Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots

In this paper, we describe two sets of experiments with small groups of real robots, conducted over the course of more than 10 years, in the Bristol Robotics Lab. The long-term aim of these ongoing experiments is to explore aspects of the question'how do we have culture?' in a new way, by modelling the low-level processes and mechanisms of cultural evolution with robots. In this paper we adopt Mesoudi's definition of culture: 'information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such as imitation, teaching or language' [1]. We outline two sets of experiments--the first already completed and the second in preparation--with a focus on two of these transmission mechanisms: imitation and language. The first set of experiments we describe were directly inspired by the thought experiment in [2, p. 106], which imagines a group of robots capable of imitating each other. Referred to as Copybots, their ability to imitate actions with variation makes them very simple meme machines. Another source of inspiration was Gabriel Tarde who proposed'a remarkable sociological research project' [3] when he wrote If we wish to make sociology a truly experimental science and stamp it with the seal of exactness, we must, I believe … write out with the greatest care and in the greatest possible detail the succession of minute transformations in the political or industrial world, or some other sphere of life, … in (our) native town or village, beginning in (our) own immediate surroundings (quoted in [3, p. 511]). A second and more recent set of experiments extends our robots' cognitive capabilities with simulation-based internal models. A simulation-based internal model (literally a robot with a simulation of itself, inside itself), allows a robot to be able to ask itself'what if' questions. This capability has been described as a functional imagination [4], as it enables a robot to'imagine' the consequences of its actions (and--in our implementation--the reaction of others to those actions). Our experimental implementation of a simulation-based internal model, which we refer to as a consequence engine (CE), has proven to be remarkably powerful. Our experiments with the CE were inspired by both the simulation theory of cognition [5,6] and Dennett's'Tower of Generate-and-Test' [7].